“My training was never to drink after dinner nor before I wrote nor while I was writing.”
— Ernest Hemingway
“Something, or something awful or something wonderful was certain to happen on every day in this part of Africa.”
“I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends.”
“The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything.”
“And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it.”
“But in the night he woke and held her tight as though she were all of life and it was being taken from him. He held her feeling she was all of life there was and it was true.”
“Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it.”
“It is impossible to believe the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure, classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet serge draped over a stick.”
“There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.”
“All bad writers are in love with the epic.”
“As in no other form of lute or combat, the conditions are such; the winner takes nothing, neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notion of glory, nor if he wins far enough, will he find anything within himself.”
“The old man looked at him with his sun-burned, confident loving eyes.”
“Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.”
“I felt very lonely when they were all there.”
“If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.”
“Shooting gives me a good feeling. It is faster than baseball and you are out on one strike.”
“Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers.”
“It was strange how easy being tired enough made it.”
“I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.”
“A big lie is more plausible than truth.”
“In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardness are easy to see, and they called it style.”
“Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”
“He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later.”
“Why must all of the operations in life be performed without an anesthetic?”
“For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.”
“No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.”
“He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.”
“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.”
“When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.”
“Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.”
“He was violating the second rule of the two rules for getting on well with people that speak Spanish; give the men tobacco and leave the women alone.”
“You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.”
“Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.”
“I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking a beer.”
“That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.”
“We wait always for something that does not come.”
“I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another’s company and aid in consultation.”
“I never had to choose a subject – my subject rather chose me.”
“Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.”
“There is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dissect out. It continues and is always valid.”
“Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.”
“It’s a town you come to for a short time.”
“They arrested us after breakfast.”
“A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.”
“As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ’forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”
“Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”
“Practice any faith you wish. Got a ball field up the island where you can practice. I’ll give the Deity a fast one high and inside if he crowds the plate.”
“I did not understand them but they did not have any mystery, and when I understood them they meant nothing to me. I was sorry about this but there was nothing I could do about it.”
“I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.”
“Defense is the stronger form with the negative object, and attack the weaker form with the positive object.”
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